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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I think there is some anxiety on the part of people who love code, and find the computer to be a little magic almost-thinking box that is one of the most interesting things humans have ever invented, that the boring careerists will take all the fun out of it. Somebody is willing to pay us to play with the magic box, but now these other folks have come along and they don’t even seem to enjoy the game? WTF, go away if you don’t actually like it!

But then I put on my grown-up hat and realize that there really are customer needs to be satisfied, the less enthralled do real work, and they have as much right as the rest of us get a paycheck.

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I think this hits the mark, or almost hits the mark. I think there is more to it. People who are passionate about computer programming and also do it off the job will over time gain more experience and knowledge than their only on the job counterparts. There is at least one additional anxiety, which is, that in a company people don't listen to those, who do it with passion, and rather play hierarchy games. When they don't listen and the things you predicted then happen, impacting your work, then it sucks and it was entirely preventable. So the anxiety is, that people will think of not passionate employee A the same as passionate employee B, even though one of them has a lot more experience due to lots of free time projects and exploring things outside of work, and will give their opinion equal weight, potentially leading to bad decisions, that impact what B needs to work with.

> People who are passionate about computer programming and also do it off the job will over time gain more experience and knowledge than their only on the job counterparts.

Those who are passionate also have a tendency to use their personal time to "try/do/fix that one last thing for work" because they are really excited.

The problem is the said extra work gradually eats into personal time & projects and it raises baseline expectations from the employer even when it stops being fun. Then the grind begins with no personal time or projects. That's a common recipe for burn-out.

Those who can have strict separation between work & personal time or projects will obviously not fall into this trap but when you are excited and passionate, its hard to realize and fight against it.

This is something I had to learn the hard way. My first job, I didn't even sign up as a programmer. One day someone was like, man, this is such a boring task (setting up excel sheets from one format to another). So I wrote a VBA script to automate it. At the time I was playing with C# and bash at home, setting up a home lab. So when I started getting asked to write other things, I was elated. Fast forward a year or two and now I'm the "VBA/bash/C#/typescript/react/sql/blah" guy and I've gone from solving work problems for fun and doing it just because I have to. That job didn't last long after that point. My current job has pretty clear-cut lines. I only work on work-related stuff at work, and personal stuff at home.

I don’t disagree in general, but I remember the world before careerists and we were also listening to and collaborating with customers, and delivering results.

Maybe significantly more tham today.

I remember talking constantly with end-users 20 years ago, something I’ve seen countless PMs dreading, postponing and treating like an absolute chore. I’ve experimented, A/B tested and rolled back code in enterprise, something that is a bureaucratic nightmare even in agile startups.

If they have rights to a paycheck, then we should also have rights to not have the joy sucked out of it.

There's more anxiety in the people who only code for $$ because deep down they know they're at a disadvantage, so they try to suppress the hobby/passion people with all kinds of "x should y" statements.

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